Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2000, pages 105-106

Books

Encounters With Saudi Arabia

Edited by Abdullmohsin H. Mosallam, Saudi Ministry of Information, 1999, 299 pp. List $20.00; AET: $15 for one, $20.00 for two.

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

Although I received my first visa for Saudi Arabia in 1951, due to a change of travel plans I never actually set foot there until 1970 (on a different visa), and then for only a few days’ visit. So why did I, who haven’t lived there and whose longest visit was for only five weeks, so enjoy a book written by 54 non-Saudis who were residents of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for periods ranging from11¼2 to 23years, some of them as children, the majority as expatriate workers, and a few of them as both, and who together offer the perspectives ofnine different nationalities.

I suppose it’s because over the past 30 years I have visited this rapidly changing country some 50 times in several capacities, including twice with a camera crew, and on a couple of those visits was offered positions that made me consider relocating. In each case there were overriding reasons for regretfully declining the offer, but ever since I’ve wondered what life there might have been like for me and my family. And after my two filming forays, I always wondered whether I had done justice to a country that gave birth to one of the world’s two most widely practiced religions, encompasses hundreds of miles of almost-deserted coastline, a vast interior desert, great cities that began as oases in that desert or along those shores, and some of the most spectacular mountain villages in the world.

Even more important, I wondered if I had captured on film the essence of the Saudi Arabian people. They are doubly unique, both for themselves and for the Arabian culture they spread over the whole swath of southern and central Asia, and deep into Africa and Europe. Parts of that culture endure wherever Islam has taken hold.

This book was my reality check, even though, as a Saudi Ministry of Information-sponsored compilation of individual stories, it obviously accentuates the positive. However, these individual narratives by both short- and long-term guests of the Saudis answered my questions about what might have been if I had joined their expatriate ranks, and some of what is truly unique about their Saudi hosts.

During my visits in the early 1970s, when Jeddah was both the commercial and cultural capital of the country, as a natural history buff I looked with awe at a glass case in the lobby of the U.S. Mission, now the Consulate General, containing one of the most beautiful private seashell collections I had ever seen. The collection, I was told, was the gift of one American Embassy secretary who had started snorkeling in Jeddah’s beautiful coastal inlet known as “the Creek” and, judging from the quality of the tropical shells she had found, presumably had graduated to scuba diving off the less-protected Red Sea shores.

Sure enough, virtually every one of the expatriate authors of this book who has lived in Jeddah dwells lovingly on underwater observations of the vast array of colorful fish and corals so accessible even to the novice, along with carefree picnics on the uncluttered open beaches, or barbecues with Saudis in the weekend retreats that have grown up along the banks of the Creek.

On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula lies the Eastern Province and a different world. It is based partly upon date palm oases as old as humankind—as attested by the Stone Age implements and Bronze Age potsherds still found in the desert—and partly on the mid-20th century oil rigs that blossomed there right after World War II and, within two decades, totally revolutionized life in every nook and cranny of the Kingdom.

Even before I first set foot in Saudi Arabia, my children had accompanied schoolmates from the American Community School in Beirut home for holidays in the ARAMCO compound in Dhahran, and came back raving about tree-shaded suburban ramblers with green lawns and all within walking distance of fast food emporiums “just like America.”

Later, when I visited Dhahran and nearby Al Khobar, both on the Arabian Gulf coast, I filled in details for myself. Although the two towns and the gleaming modern campus of the University of Petroleum and Minerals have grown around them by now, the compounds originally built for the foreign technicians who worked in the oilfields and at present-day Dhahran International Airport were surrounded by desert in the early days. Encounters With Saudi Arabia documents some of the impressions of the American and other foreign children who grew up in those compounds, and their always poignant encounters with Bedouin children whose tents would briefly appear and then disappear from the open spaces outside the compound walls.

There also are accounts by former “ARAMCO brats” of memorable encounters with the royal entourages which would arrive for the inauguration of a new major petroleum installation. These meetings were with impressibly tall and gracious King Abdul Aziz, founder of the modern Kingdom, or his ruler sons, to whom the kids would present flowers or poems of welcome, and receive gifts ranging from candy to coins in return.

The rock collector in me was awestruck one day in the 1970s while prowling outside the walls of the American Consulate compound, when I came across a pile of discards of some bygone American resident who must have taken his or her best crystal and mineral specimens home upon transfer. But left in the open field were rejected specimens that would have been considered mineralogical treasures in most places I had lived.

The Dhahran reminiscences in the book describe rock-hunting expeditions, finding three- and four-thousand-year-old potsherds at abandoned village and camp sites, and fishing expeditions into the not-so-clear but ever-so-rich waters of the Gulf which yielded dozens of fish, all of them “keepers.”

A Capital Transformation

When I first visited Riyadh, the Kingdom’s political capital, it was a small, mostly walled town, with houses and walls alike made of beige mudbricks and sandstone blocks, situated on a high and dry interior plateau. There were no embassies or large hotels, and most of the foreigners living in Riyadh were employed by members of the ruling Al Saud family, living mostly in a string of palaces among trees and green fields in a narrow wadi outside the town. There was a hiatus of three years starting in 1973 when I didn’t visit Riyadh, and when next I arrived, on a flight from Yemen, I awoke from a deep sleep to find the plane flying over a large, sprawling city of white buildings and no beige walls in sight. For a moment I thought that I must have boarded the wrong flight and slept until it started descending over some major African capital. What a difference three years had made, and that was only the beginning of the transformation of the entire Kingdom.

Saudi Arabia used its oil money to send a whole generation of its best and brightest students abroad for degrees from foreign universities. While the Kingdom waited for their return, it imported tens of thousands of foreigners, from architects and engineers to bulldozer operators and construction site laborers, to launch perhaps the biggest building boom in modern history. All of the cities were vastly enlarged, and linked with four- and six-lane freeways. For the past 30 years the once-tiny national capital has been a vast construction site which has produced literally hundreds of tall office buildings, modern hotels and shopping malls, and thousands of suburban villas. Throughout this period Riyadh could be distinguished on windless days from far across the desert by the huge cloud of brown construction dust rising into the cloudless blue skies.

I remember joking in 1978 with a resident who had just taken me to a Chinese restaurant that “when you also have a Mexican restaurant in Riyadh, I’ll grant you that world culture has arrived.” “I’ll take you to a Mexican restaurant tomorrow night,” he replied.” And he did.

Today there are surely 20 restaurants of each genre in Riyadh, as well as representatives of every other national cuisine a visitor could possibly wish for. A Japanese restaurant is one of the most popular eating spots in the Saudi capital. It is separate but on the same floor of the Hyatt Regency hotel as an Italian restaurant and the hotel’s main dining room. Virtually every one of the city’s several five-star hotels has, in addition to its regular dining room and an American-style coffee shop, one to three “ethnic restaurants” as well. And the Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendys, Taco Bell and Roy Rogers outlets are beyond counting.

All of the history of turning a small walled capital into a world metropolis within 30 years, from the time foreign technicians did virtually everything through the time the male and female Saudi graduates returned from abroad to staff the government ministries, hospitals and ultra-modern national universities themselves, is told by the contributors to Encounters With Saudi Arabia.

As for my own limited perspective, on all of my early visits to Riyadh I had hopefully raised the subject of a fabulous field of multimillion-year-old marine fossils I had read about somewhere in the desert escarpments east of Riyadh. The topic usually elicited blank stares from expatriates and Saudis alike. Nevertheless, I knew that if I ever moved to Riyadh, I would be spending weekends prowling those escarpments, just as the Saudi elites of Riyadh spent their weekends creating what they used to call “camps,” and now call “farms,” outside the capital.

Finally in the mid-’80s the Palestinian-American press attaché at the U.S. Embassy, which by then had been moved from Jeddah to Riyadh, told me he would take me and my wife to a well-known fossil field for a family picnic. It was all I had hoped. After I had stuffed my pockets with at least one of each of the dozens of petrified life forms represented, and as the sun was sinking, I turned my attention to photographing the vivid colors of the cliffs and sand dunes, and the myriad desert wild flowers sprinkled among them.

For me it was a perfect day and, sure enough, the accounts of many of the expatriates who spent all or part of their Saudi years in Riyadh are sprinkled with accounts of similar days among pristine desert beauty that, even now, awaits the visitor to this vast land. In fact, although its population has tripled in the 30 years I have been coming and going, Saudi Arabia remains unspoiled and welcoming.

The 54 authors of Encounters With Saudi Arabia are varied. There are Oriental rug collectors, graphic artists, Arabian horse fanciers, a full-time professional piano tuner, Bedouin jewelry collectors, an architect and even a snooker enthusiast who found somewhere to play nearly every evening, and with Saudi and fellow expatriate enthusiasts arranged to bring world champion snooker players to Saudi Arabia for tournaments. The bonds that connect these accounts by such a varied selection of writers are their memories of the uniquely warm friendships, some casual and brief and some for a lifetime, they formed with individual Saudis.

Legendary Hospitality

Arab hospitality, of course, is legendary, whether the visitor is in Morocco or 3,500 miles away in Oman. In Saudi Arabia it takes on certain characteristics of its own. Saudi social life is largely family-oriented, and extended Saudi families are very large. I know a happily married member of the royal family with grown sons of his own. Yet when he is in the capital, which is about half of the time, he has lunch virtually every day with his widowed mother, usually along with brothers and sisters, now all in their 50s. Such close family ties, and the fact that outside the family Saudi men and women in conservative Riyadh and to only a slightly lesser extent in some other parts of the country entertain separately, only complicates social interaction with foreigners.

So, although for new expatriate arrivals Saudis are hard to meet on a social basis, a Saudi friend is a friend for life. And, yes, one has to be careful in admiring any of his or her possessions. Once a Saudi minister, a fellow alumnus of the University of Southern California like hundreds of other Saudis, offered me a ride in his brand-new sports car. When he asked me how I liked it, he noted my hesitation. “Don’t worry,” he reassured me. “No matter what you say I’m not going to give it to you. I like it too much myself.”

But another time, during the Gulf war, I mentioned to a Saudi friend that the Riyadh hotel in which I was staying was selling T- shirts advertising the comfort and safety of its air raid shelter against Iraqi missiles. If I wore such a T-shirt back home, I said jokingly, my grandchildren would be very impressed. On the day I was leaving, a package was delivered to my hotel room containing seven of the T-shirts, one for me and six for the grandchildren.

Saudi Arabia still has many expatriate workers, though now it is seeking to reduce those numbers to create opportunities in the private sector as well as the government for its own young people. In line with this policy the expatriate American community has declined from about 60,000 in the 1980s to perhaps 40,000 today (excluding the U.S. military). The Kingdom also hosts two million short-term foreign visitors in one four-day period during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca (and to Medina as well, for those who have the time to spare). In addition, tens of thousands of other foreign Muslims visit the country every year for the lesser pilgrimage, or on private pilgrimages of their own. So foreigners are no novelty.

But, despite seeing daily on their streets more foreigners than most citizens of other countries see in a lifetime, the Saudis don’t take their visitors for granted, and are instinctively generous to the least of them, as the contributors to Encounters With Saudi Arabia point out. The book is very attractively designed and presented. My only regret is that few of the nearly 50 full-page or two-page color photographs by one Australian and two Saudi photographers are captioned. The result is artistic, but frustrating to the kind of reader who wants to know exactly where some of the buildings, faces, landscapes and seascapes were recorded

I resolved in reviewing this book not to spoil it for anyone by recounting any of the hundreds of illuminating, and touching, anecdotes it contains. I’ll close, however, with one citation from the submission by James Henry Dobson, an American who at the time he wrote it had lived for 10 years in Saudi Arabia helping an indigenous fast-food operation develop nation-wide franchises.

Writes Dobson: “My wife and I were waiting with our two daughters, who were still small at the time, for our flight to leave the Riyadh Airport. A little Saudi girl who was close to my kids in age was also waiting for a flight with her parents. Predictably, the three children were soon together having a great time. The Saudi family’s flight was about to leave, so the little girl’s mother called for her to come. The girl skipped a few happy steps toward her mother, then stopped, turned around and ran back to my daughters. She pulled a small toy from her pocket, put it in my older daughter’s hand and then darted off again to join her parents. Such a spontaneous act of giving in one so young was truly beautiful to behold.”

Clearly this habitual generosity starts early and most Saudis never outgrow it. Anyone who has ever lived in Saudi Arabia will love this book. And anyone who is weighing the pros and cons of employment in the Kingdom needs this book. By the time they finish reading it they will know whether they would be the type of expatriate who keeps returning, as so many of these authors have, or who just counts the days until the job is done. And by giving a copy to an old Saudi hand, or a would-be new one, readers of this review can themselves be a Saudi for a day, without giving up either a toy or a sports car.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Available through the AET Book Club.